I’m looking at my blog, and the last time I posted was back on June 10th. Wow, that is a long time ago! So the obvious question is, what has our family been up to since then?

At the end of June, Lisa, Alan, and I flew to Dallas for a few days. Then we flew up to Washington state. We had a busy two weeks planned.

We went on a trip from Tokyo to Dallas, Dallas to Seattle, and then from there we had a bit of a classic American Road Trip. From Seattle to Omak, and then through to Helena, Montana, back to Omak, up to Osooyoos, Canada for lunch (because hey, we have our passports) and then back to Seattle, and finally back home to Tokyo. We had some stops on the way in Wenatchee and Leavenworth as well.

We had a joyous occasion for the travel: my younger sister, Jana, got married to Marco! I’ll get to that in another posting.

We also celebrated the lives of two important women in my life. My mother, Judy Marie (Kirk) Evans, passed away on June 12th, and shortly thereafter on June 29th my paternal grandmother, Bessie Evans passed.

We’ve set up memorial obituaries for them at Pax Memoriam:

• Judy Marie (Kirk) Evans
• Bessie Marie Evans

Since this was Alan’s first time on an airplane, we had plenty to keep us occupied as we flew over. I was surprised that the airlines (in our case, American) had a baby bassinet that could be hooked up for us. I would have thought that you could reserve the bassinet, but it is on a first-come first-serve basis, and your plane might or might not have one. Usually they do. They have mountings for multiple bassinets, but probably only have one. They really should try to set up some sort of ordering system so that they can load the bassinet when they need it, and not bring it when they don’t, and also allow more customers to make use of it. Alan slept pretty well in it on the flight out (on the flight back the timing wasn’t as good and he didn’t sleep as much.) Still, it was great that they had something like that.

In Dallas we met up with Dad, and also had the time to go to a Ranger’s game! We saw Darvish pitch, which was great, but they lost the game (which wasn’t so great.) Still, Alan got his first Major League baseball game before he hit one year old! I think that is pretty good.

From Dallas we flew to Seattle, and then drove to Wenatchee, where we stayed with our cousins for the Fourth of July. Alan got to meet a lot of cousins, and play with some fireworks. We also had a nice US style barbeque. Great food, although probably a bit too much of it. Nah.

We drove the next day to Helena Montana, where my younger sister was living. I’ll get into that more in the next post. We had a lot of fun over there, and then she had an amazing wedding, and we drove back to Washington state.

We took a tour of Helena on train-type thing, and Alan rode his first Carousel at the Great Northern Carousel, which conveniently is co-located with an ice cream shop.

We drove back to Washington and prepared for the memorial services for mom and grandma. On the way we stopped at the place that my dad is having his 1948 Hudson Hornet and 1954 Pontiac repaired. Since Grandma passed, and he has kept those cars in her garage on and off since high school, he plans to drive them from Washington State to Texas. I think we’ll try to accompany him on that trip, but in the meantime the cars have to have some modern components installed for safety.

I don’t have much to say about the services. I think they were wonderfully done. We had services for Grandma and Mom at the same place, back to back. A lot of people were able to come, since they were held in Grandma’s hometown, which is a short drive from mom’s hometown. I prepared a few things and read them, but what was really nice is that many of the people that came shared memories and stories they had. It was really amazing to hear one of Grandma’s students talk about how Grandma pushed her and had a big influence in her life. Grandma went back to school in her 50s and eventually earned a Master’s of Education and taught at the local high school. I don’t know how she was as a teacher, but she didn’t put up with any nonsense and always expected the best of you. She introduced us to literature and poetry when we were young, and always had interesting activities for us when we would visit from California. One summer, she opened up her freezer and gave us snowballs that she had made and saved during the winter, since us California kids had never seen snow before.

Snowballs don’t really freeze well, but that didn’t stop us from having fun.

After the services, which included a wonderful song by family members, we had a live butterfly release outside of the funeral home. I don’t really have a good way to express how I feel, but both mom and grandma will be greatly missed.

After the services, we had a reception at the Bread Line Cafe in Omak. A lot of family made the trip out, so Alan met a lot of cousins. We even got this great picture with Grandpa Kirk and all of the attending great grand kids. That is a lot of great grandchildren!

Finally, in the evening, even though the day was already quite long enough, we had a birthday cake for Lisa. Note that kid that is super excited to see Lisa is not our son, but my sister’s son Scout, who is super cute and really likes Lisa.

The next day we took a quick trip up to Osooyoos, Canada. We had our passports, and I don’t know when we’ll have a chance to take a trip up to Canada again. Since grandma has passed, we won’t be able to stay in Omak any more, and Brewster is a bit further (only about another hour) from the border. So it sounded like a good idea. We had a nice lunch – Poutine is ridiculous – and then headed back towards to Seattle.

We made a quick stop in Leavenworth for lunch, which is a tourist town made up to look like an old German town. We spent the night in the outskirts of Seattle with our friends the Weavers, and then were back on the plane to Tokyo.

Alan packed in a lot in his first trip to America.